Receiver mixers are a basic component in RF communication systems. Receiver mixers down-convert received RF signals into intermediate frequency (IF) signals or directly into zero intermediate frequency (ZIF) signals by multiplying the received signal with a local oscillator (LO) clock signal. ZIF, also known as homodyne or “direct conversion”, is typically easier to implement in a receiver chip than IF conversion because ZIF eliminates pass-band filtering associated with IF conversion and reduces the space and complexity of the receiver as well as cost. A typical direct conversion receiver includes one or more LNAs (low noise amplifiers), a balun, in-phase (I) and quadrature-phase (Q) mixers and two low-pass filters.
Receiver mixers can be passive or active. An active mixer provides gain while converting an RF signal. However, active mixers cause higher distortion and have a higher noise figure. The higher noise figure arises from flicker noise which is not present in passive mixers. Flicker noise is very harmful for narrow band RF applications like GSM (Global System for Mobile communications). In addition, active mixers consume more power than their passive mixer counterparts.
RF communication systems usually implement duplex operation by way of a transceiver where the receiver and transmitter components function simultaneously. During transceiver operation, the transmitter typically sends signals at a high power level, injecting interference at the receiver. To counteract the interference, the receiver LNA and mixer typically have a very high linearity, especially for mixers where the RF signal is amplified after the LNA stage. For direct conversion receivers, mitigating transmitter-induced interference becomes even more important. Direct conversion receivers are typically designed to have good linearity. Especially the second order inter-modulation product is important. The second order inter-modulation product is often described by the second order input intercept point (IIP2).
IIP2 performance can be improved by using differential RF signals and a symmetric receiver topology to cancel nonlinearity caused by the transistors. A balun is conventionally used to perform single-ended to differential conversion. However, when differential RF signals are used and the receiver is configured in an RF current driving mode, a two-phase clock scheme is not feasible because the in-phase mixer loads the quadrature-phase mixer and vice versa, resulting in conversion gain drop and IQ leakage. One approach to solve this involves using a four-phase non-overlapping local oscillator clock scheme. A four-phase clock scheme also has higher conversion gain than 2-phase clocking schemes for capacitive mixer loads.
However, the duty cycle employed in sinusoidal four-phase clock schemes is typically narrow (e.g., less than 25%) to maintain non-overlapping sinusoidal I and Q clock input signals, making clock driver design difficult. When the receiving RF frequency increases, the clock signal duty cycle becomes narrower, making clock driver design even more difficult. Moreover, linearity for direct conversion passive mixers is related to the gate over-drive voltage applied to the mixer transistors. This in turn requires a large clock swing, especially for duplex communication systems where transmitter leakage interference is down-converted into the baseband signal. Increasing the bias voltage of the sinusoidal clock signals to achieve higher gate over-drive can cause overlapping clock signals, e.g. larger than 25% duty cycle, which adversely affects mixer functionality.
Also, conventional four-phase mixer architectures employ a clock driver chain having a relatively low tapering factor, meaning that more clock driver stages are required to drive the mixers and simultaneously maintain a desired duty cycle. Accordingly, the energy consumed in the clock driver cannot be recovered by a resonator tank circuit, resulting in higher power consumption. It is also difficult to align the edge of a positive clock signal with the edge of a negative clock signal, distorting down-converted baseband signals. Furthermore, it is difficult to keep the four-phase clock signals as non-overlapped because the duty cycle is small. The clock driver must be designed in a symmetric style to reach a high IIP2. Yet, process mismatch will always set an IIP2 limit. Transistor mismatch can be mitigated by increasing transistor size, but this increases power consumption in the clock driver.